Red Engine
He brought the bike to life with a roar and sped back the way he came.
The sun was nearing the horizon when they caught up with him on Black Canyon Highway dead in the middle of Phoenix. It was a disaster. When the cars finished crumpling and the metal stopped screaming, Grief was amazed to find himself still whole and alive. He couldn’t credit his own skill with his miraculous escape from the pile-up, so the bike must have been good for something.
He sat there, straddling the bike, gaping at the mess he had somehow weaved through, hearing the sobs of the injured, trying to get his breathing under control, trying to figure out how his luck could be so bad that this could happen now, when the driver-side door of a nearby shattered Volvo burst open. The man who stepped out didn’t seem to mind his broken arm, he just kept his gaze fixed on Grief as he limped towards him.
Grief gazed back in dawning horror. Proxies had just caused a smash-up on a major highway, injuring or killing God knows how many, in an attempt to get him. Muttering a non-stop stream of obscenities, Grief spun the bike around and escaped down Camelback Road, then turned onto a side street.
The proxy dove back into his Volvo and soon the half-wrecked car was limping after the Hallowjack. A dilapidated green van disengaged itself from the tangle of cars and joined the pursuit, its driver and passengers all flesh puppets of the Red Engine. The driver of a formerly sleek corvette also tried to serve his master’s will, but his vehicle was a crippled lost cause.
The chase was a darting, reckless one, serenaded by the blaring horns of outraged drivers. Grief cleared his mind of all concerns except speed and gave himself over to the motorcycle, the world tilting and blurring past him. The Volvo ended its run with a brutal collision with an SUV but the van would not be stopped. Still, it was too slow and disappeared from Grief’s rearview after a couple minutes, but he knew better than to think they weren’t still on his trail. They didn’t have to see him to find him.
The place for a stand presented itself: a gas station and car-wash, side by side.
He swung into the lot and skidded to a stop in front of a pump. The green van rounded the corner at the end of the street just as he jerked the gas hose from its holster. It took too many precious seconds to spray a barbell-like symbol on the pavement in gasoline. This was another word of the Omerta Tongue, the language of the Outer Roads.
The van, filled with dark and menacing silhouettes, swung into the lot just as Grief lit a match, dropped it onto the symbol and spoke the word. The match winked out when it touched the gas and the van exploded as its fuel tank ignited. Grief and two other men, who had been filling their tanks and trying to ignore the weirdo with the bike, were thrown to the ground by the blast, eyes burning and ears ringing.